Democrats Insult Women in Massachussets

It's almost as if Democrats have a slow-moving death wish with regard to the "Teddy Kennedy Senate Seat". First, they pushed a woefully unprepared Caroline Kennedy for the seat. And now they're telling people to vote for a DA who took brazenly wrong legal actions based upon political considerations, because she is a woman. This is a vile insult to the vast majority of women in the country. (Ann Althouse voted for Obama).

Are people on the Left aware that Supreme Court Justices Scalia and Thomas came down on Coakley's left with regard to protection of the rights of the accused?

. . . as DA in Middlesex County, Coakley opposed efforts to create an innocence commission in Massachusetts, calling the idea “backward-looking instead of forward-looking.” Of course, that’s sort of the point — to find people who have been wrongfully convicted. So far, there have been at least 23 exonerations in Massachusetts, including several in Coakley’s home county.

I followed Dorothy Rabinowitz' pieces exposing the travesties of the Amirault trial - she won a Pulitzer Prize for her series on this case. First-rate reporting. There's a book, in case you are not familiar with the Amirault case - a nightmare of child abuse by "investigators" and adult abuse by prosecutors. Coakley's conduct in the re-prosecution, as described by Rabinowitz, was absolutely despicable. And she has recently defended her actions.

Recalling to mind the Salem witch trials of long ago, Rabinowitz writes:

What does this say about her candidacy? (Ms. Coakley declined to be interviewed.) If the current attorney general of Massachusetts actually believes, as no serious citizen does, the preposterous charges that caused the Amiraults to be thrown into prison—the butcher knife rape with no blood, the public tree-tying episode, the mutilated squirrel and the rest—that is powerful testimony to the mind and capacities of this aspirant to a Senate seat. It is little short of wonderful to hear now of Ms. Coakley's concern for the rights of terror suspects at Guantanamo—her urgent call for the protection of the right to the presumption of innocence.

If the sound of ghostly laughter is heard in Massachusetts these days as this campaign rolls on, with Martha Coakley self-portrayed as the guardian of justice and civil liberties, there is good reason.

Some on the Left give Coakley a pass because of her politics. Glenn Reynolds on the old Lefty arguments for excusing gratuitous brutality, corruption, etc. in order to usher in utopia: "You can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs, revolutionary truth is better than bourgeois truth, yada yada."

On the other hand, Coakley did go out of her way to keep a man who was later convicted of raping his 23-month old niece with a hot object - probably a curling iron - out of jail, apparently for political reasons (the rapist's father was a union representative who was getting donations for a Coakley election campaign). Would it really be a victory for women to elect this person to the U.S. Senate just because she is a woman? Where are the Duke 88 and the media when you need them to oppose special treatment for rapists? (Obama came down on the right side of the law in the Duke case).

It is astounding to me that Democrats would choose a person with a record like Coakley's to run for this seat. But Democrats really have had a lock, pretty much, on this senate seat for a long time. And identity politics is big in Massachusetts.

Additionally, Coakley DID have most of BIG JOURNALISM pulling for her. Thank goodness for new journalism and for local papers in Massachusetts who stood up to the New York Times and its sister publications. From the comments at the link:

Coakley is not the prosecutor, she is the persecutor. She deserves to be in prison. An immoral prosecutor is the most dangerous official of all.